This page is a user's work in progress page, not an article, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable. The current/final version of this article is, or will be, located at Asterisk - the open source soft PBX (PPC).

WARNING!

Your results may vary if you try to implement what you see here, specifically I'm not sure about all of the packages needed to get Asterisk to compile properly. And I have had some significant problems in getting bluetooth audio (SCO) to work properly to channel the calls from the cellphone to asterisk

Abstract

The idea for this concept came from a bluetooth cordless cellphone extender that I saw at someone's house like this one: Bluetooth to Cordless Phone. Sometime later, I read about chan_mobile which is an Asterisk channel driver that allows you to use a bluetooth capable cell phone as an FXS channel. Asterisk will accept a ATA that you could "open" from VOIP phone service such as Vonage as an FXO channel.

Well that was enough to get me started, so I implemented this solution first on an Ubuntu box. I'm still working on getting it fully implemented on a PPC linkstation. Bluetooth audio (SCO) has been the sticking point, but I'm confident that kernel 2.6.28+ will be the answer.

This would allow you to use a Linkstation running Asterisk in order to turn a cellphone into a trunk for 1 or more SIP Phones or ATAs. Asterisk is pretty powerful and would allow you to integrate POTS/PSTN lines (with a FXO/FXS adapter like the SPA3102), a VOIP service (such as Vonage), and now a Cell Phone too!

Prerequisites

This article assumes that you have installed FreeLink on PPC Box that has been U-booted. You also will need to upgrade to a 2.6.28+ Kernel, (the bluetooth SCO audio driver doesn't seem to work right otherwise).

In order to implement this on a ARM box you would need to cross compile asterisk, as it will not natively compile on this architecture. Your results may vary with MIPSel, but this article might be a good starting point: Asterisk - the open source soft PBX (MIPSel)

If you see your phone above all is well and we can now search for your bluetooth devices using
the CLI command 'mobile search'. Be patient with this command as it will take 8 - 10 seconds to do the discovery.

References

This article was HEAVILY plagarized from the references below, but I figured I'd try to gather the information in one place. Unfortunately chan_mobile does not have great documentation, the best documentation for it seems to be at Voip-info.org.